With advances in integrated circuit, microprocessor, networking and communication technologies, an increasing number of devices, in particular, digital computing devices, are being interconnected. This increased interconnectivity of computing devices has laid the groundwork for a communication infrastructure particularly well suited for electronic communications between such computing devices. More specifically, the increased interconnectivity of computing devices has led to the near ubiquitous adoption of electronic mail (email) as a standard mode of communication.
In the past, electronic mail communications were limited to the exchange of text-based messages between a relatively small populous. Over time, however, email applications and associated communications protocols have become increasingly sophisticated enabling more complex messages to be exchanged between larger numbers of individuals. For example, in addition to enabling the exchange of simple text-messages, many modern day email clients allow users to exchange complex, multipart MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) encoded files as well as a wide variety of binary attachments. Furthermore, with the introduction of web-based email clients that utilize World Wide Web protocols, such as the hypertext transmission protocol (HTTP) for the exchange of messages, access to email has become even more prolific.